Operation Spider's Web

This week we talk about drone warfare, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and total war.

We also discuss casualty numbers, population superiority, and lingering munitions.

Recommended Book: The Burning Earth by Sunil Amrith

Transcript

Eight years after Russia launched a halfheartedly concealed invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, under the guise of helping supposedly oppressed Russian-speakers and Russia loyalists in the area, in February of 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

This invasion followed months of military buildup along the two countries’ shared borders, and was called a special military operation by Russian President Putin. It was later reported that this was intended to be a quick, one or a few day decapitation attack against Ukraine, Russia’s forces rapidly closing the distance between the border and Ukraine’s capitol, Kyiv, killing or imprisoning all the country’s leadership, replacing it with a puppet government loyal to Putin, and that would be that.

Ukraine had been reorienting toward the European Union and away from Russia’s sphere of influence, and Russia wanted to put a stop to that realignment and bring the country fully back under its control, as was the case before 2014, when a series of protests turned into an uprising that caused their then-leader, a puppet of Russia, to flee the country; he, of course, fled to Russia.

On paper, Ukraine was at a massive disadvantage in this renewed conflict, as Russia is a global-scale player, while Ukraine is relatively small, and back in 2014 had one of its major ports and a huge chunk of its territory stolen by Russia.

Russia also has nukes, has a massive conventional military, and has a far larger economy and population. Analysts near-universally assumed Ukraine would collapse under the weight of Russia’s military, perhaps holding out for weeks or months if they were really skillful and lucky, but probably days.

That didn’t end up being the case. Despite Russia’s substantial and multifarious advantages, Ukraine managed to hold out against the initial invasion, against subsequent pushes, and then managed to launch its own counterattacks. For more than three years, it has held its ground against Russia’s onslaught, against continuous land incursions, and against seemingly endless aerial attacks by jets, by bombers, and by all sorts of rockets, missiles, and drones.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to determine actual casualty and fatality numbers in this conflict, as both sides are incentivized to adjust these figures, either to show how horrible the other side is, or to make it seem like they’re suffering less than they are for moral purposes.

But it’s expected that Russia will hit a milestone of one million casualties sometime in the summer of 2025, if it hasn’t actually hit that number already, and it’s estimated that as many as 250,000 Russian soldiers have already been killed in Ukraine.

For context, that’s about five-times as many deaths as Russia suffered in all the wars it fought, post-WWII (as both the Soviet Union and Russia), combined. That’s also fifteen-times as many fatalities as they suffered in their ten-year-long war in Afghanistan, and ten-times as many deaths as in their 13-year-long war in Chechnya.

It’s also estimated that Russia has lost something like 3,000-4,000 tanks, 9,000 armored vehicles, 13,000 artillery systems, and more than 400 air defense systems in the past year, alone; those numbers vary a bit depending on who you listen to, but those are likely the proper order of magnitude.

The country is rapidly shifting to a full-scale war footing, originally having intended to make do with a few modern systems and a whole lot of antique, Soviet military hardware they had in storage to conduct this blitzkrieg attack on Ukraine, but now they’r